FROM THIS EPISODE

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Elif Batuman never intended to study literature, learn Russian,or learn to speak Uzbek. That's no life for a grown up!. And yet she fell passionately in love with literature and uses her enormous sense of humor, her intelligence and her robust Turkish ancestry in courting her darlings — the Russian classics.